2013.07.12 18:36Why is everyone bashing OMA and Rem Koolhaas?
... just before I read your post above, I read (in the Labyrinth preface), "As for Kafka's precursors, Borges's erudition takes pleasure in finding them in Zeno of Elea, Kierkegaard and Robert Browning. In each of these authors there is some Kafka, but if Kafka had not written, nobody would have been able to notice it--whence this very Borgesian paradox" "Every writer creates his own precursors.""
Because of this thread I have a whole new appreciation of the Seattle Public Library--"a genuine affordment of a covered liberal space." Is this really something of a rare manifestation in today's urban realm? Can the SPL be seen as a truly new paradigm of "covered liberal space"? Is commerce-free, covered liberal space even a viable urban typology? Yes, "it needs more thought."

2013.07.12 19:3712 July
Just read this is Maurois's 'Preface' of Borges's Labyrinths:
(Schopenhauer, Borges remarks, has already written that life and dreams are leaves of the same book: reading them in order is living; skimming through them is dreaming.) In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams. "God, our friends, and Shakespeare will collaborate with us." Nothing pleases Borges better than to play in this way with mind, dreams, space and time. The more complicated the game becomes, the happier he is. The dreamer can be dreamed in his turn.

2013.07.14 11:31 Why is everyone bashing OMA and Rem Koolhaas?
Literally 10 minutes ago I read, "A book which does not contain its counterpoint is considered incomplete."* And yes, immediately after that I thought about whether I could perhaps try to write that way...
*Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

2013.07.18 13:13 18 July
...some Borges, some Capote, some Quondam
"A labyrinth of symbols," he corrected. "An invisible labyrinth of time."
"...I questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely."
I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally his spontaneous work. My solitary game is governed by two polar laws. The first permits me to essay variations of a formal or psychological type; the second obliges me to scarifice these variations to the "original" text and reason out this annihilation in an irrefutable manner...
Some years earlier, Lillian Ross had published Picture, her account of the making of a movie, The Red Badge of Courage; with its fast cuts, its flash forward and back it was itself like a movie, and as I read it I wondered what would happen if the author let go of her hard linear straight-reporting discipline and handled her material as if it were fictional--would the book gain or lose?
...I wonder what would happen if the architect let go of his straight-curating discipline and handled the material as if it were fictional--would the museum gain or lose?

2013.07.18 18:20 18 July
I understand you are staying at the new hotel. La Bataille. How do you find it?
Very pleasant. In a bit of turmoil because they are in the process of opening a casino. The man in charge of the casino is called Shelley Keats. I thought it was a joke at first, but that really happens to be his name.
Marcel Proust works at Le Foulard, that fine little seafood restaurant in Scheolcher, the fishing village.
Semiquincentennial: an almost novel architectonics
Miers Fisher Jr. and Helen Gregoroffsky reunited